


You wake up, and wake up

by Winterling42



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Rebellions, Reunions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-03-28 04:10:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13895961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: At the ass end of the colonized worlds, Takeshi finds his sister's final bargaining chip.





	1. Chapter 1

Kovacs stood with his gun pressed against the tech’s head--it was sloppy, but he couldn’t be sure his hands wouldn’t shake, otherwise. After all this time, if it was really her...

“The sleeve doesn’t matter,” he barked, counting down minutes in his head. Sasha was waiting outside, and Carlos was suppressing the alarm systems for now. Kovacs had hated to risk even this much, but resleeving facilities didn’t pop up like fucking flowers, especially not out here, where Rei had hidden her last chess piece. “Just spin her up.” 

“Okay, okay.” The tech kept flinching, but he knew to keep his hands where Kovacs could see them. “Please, I’m doing what you want, please--” Kovacs pushed the barrel of the gun against the tech’s neck hard enough to feel bone, to feel the edges of his stack where spine gave way to metal. He shut up after that.

Kovacs didn’t move as the sticky wave of umbilical fluid spilled over the edge of the table, but he did lean closer, pulled as if by gravity, to see her eyes open. The sleeve was an older Asiatic woman--it looked like it might have been someone’s mother once. She coughed through the umbilicus, hands grasping at nothing with sleeve-sickness. But when the tech reached out to pull the tube, she took her spasming fists and wrapped them around his throat. 

Faster than Kovacs could speak, she’d pulled herself free of the bag and slid both herself and the tech to the opposite side of the table. Still choking on the tube in her throat, she sized up the room with eyes from a stranger’s body, eyes that came to rest on Tak and the gun in his right hand. 

It was her. The kind crow’s-feet and the soft pudge at her curves did nothing to disguise the desperation in her eyes. The memory of fighting engraved in her stack, if not in the sleeve’s muscles. “Quell,” he said, tasting her name like communion. “It’s me.” 

And she loosened her grip on the tech. She was moving before he dropped, her shaking hands reaching up to pull the umbilicus, stumbling forward on new feet. “Tak,” she said, gasping out the word with her first breath. “You. What. I...” 

“We gotta go,” he told her, feeling a familiar surge of disorientation when she had to look  _ up  _ at him. “Protectorate’s not going to be happy you’re back.” 

“No,” Quellcrist Falconer said thoughtfully, running a hand through her short black hair. She was already comfortable in the sleeve, unconsciously graceful as she fell into step with him. “I don’t imagine they would be.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Where are the others?” Quell’s voice was calm and quiet as they moved towards the exit, but the words hit him like a punch to the gut. Kovacs breathed deeply through the pain, glancing over at her sticky, blanket-wrapped sleeve. 

“They’re gone,” he said shortly, cradling the pistol in his hands. There was no alarm inside the building, but he fancied he could hear sirens in the distance. “What’s the last thing you remember?” 

“The mission.” Quell looked straight ahead as they walked, hissed out a warning as a tech came around the corner. Kovacs put a bullet in the stranger’s stack without blinking, and they moved on. “We weren’t going to come back. And yet...”

“A lot’s happened since then,” Kovacs said drily. They rounded the last corner, the red EXIT sign gleaming in the dark hallway. “And there’s no good way to explain it. Once we’re safe, we can talk.” He didn’t have to say that that might take a while. 

The alarm finally went off when he pushed open the door. Not that it mattered. The sirens outside were about as loud as the ones inside. It was going to take some fancy driving to get them out of here. Kovacs gritted his teeth and got in the car behind Quell, trying to cover their rear.

In the driver’s seat, Sasha looked back at them with wide, artifically colored eyes. “You got everything you need, mate? Didn’t forget your wallet or anything?”  
Kovacs, far too well acquainted with Sasha’s sense of humor, rolled his eyes and grimaced. “Just get us out of here.” 

“Sure thing mate,” they said, grinning. Their sleeve was a cheap synth, the only thing they’d been able to afford after organic damage fried their original. It was visible in the tacky sweat on their skin, the electric blue eyes and spiky green hair they wore, and they did nothing to disguise it. 

Sasha didn’t want an upgraded sleeve because as far as they were concerned, their real sleeve was the one the three bodies were sitting in. They settled back into the driver’s seat, tapped out the commands on the dashboard, and spun up. The car around them woke with a growl, whining as they lifted off. Kovacs could see the red-blue lights of local cops outside the factory’s entrance; he counted three cars with their doors open, likely with more on the way. From the speakers, Sasha turned on the police frequency. 

Quell watched everything with a hungry look in her eyes, a familiar intensity to her expression that Tak had missed with a furious ache. To have it back hurt just as much, he found, but it was a different kind of pain. She caught him watching her out of the corner of one eye and turned to smile her strange, sad smile. Kovacs corrected himself--familiar was not the word for seeing Quell’s expressions on a new face. It was like coming home.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, in a voice that meant she was still trying to teach him something.

Kovacs hesitated before he answered. He had been talking to a voice in his head for too long--this was not Quell-as-he-remembered. And despite the futility of lying--or maybe because of it--he couldn’t answer either flippantly or sincerely. He was about to settle for a practicality when the car dropped into free fall, slamming both his and Quell’s heads against the roof. In the driver’s seat, Sasha’s empty sleeve flopped against the full-body seatbelt. 

“Whoops!” their driver said, a little too gleefully. “Coulda warned you about that one.”

“Fuck you,” Tak spit out, without meaning it. Sasha turned up the volume in response, so that everyone in the car could hear the staticy hiss of decrypted frequencies.

_ “Unit 3-21 in pursuit through the Narrows. Units 3-53 through 56 on their way. Sound off.” _

“It’s about to get a little rough, ladies and gents. I know a tunnel or two the cops don’t, if you don’t mind the sparks.” 

Tak braced himself as best he could in the non-descript backseat, one hand against the roof and one against the window. This sleeve had the spindly skeleton of a low-gravity planet, and his muscles were only now beginning to adjust to his demanding use of them. Quell, sleeve-sick as she might be (though he’d never once seen her sleeve sick) had the advantage with her compact frame. She wedged herself into the corner of the seat and the door, both feet braced, and her smile turned sharper. “They don’t know who I am.” 

“Nope.” As always, Kovacs smiled back at her. He couldn’t stop himself. For a moment, it was a great joke they had played on the world--on all the worlds. The most notorious criminals in the history of the Protectorate, being chased by a few local cops through the slums of a foreign city. And then they flipped sideways, Tak barely managing to stop himself from falling down on top of Quell. Outside, he could hear the roof of the car scrape against a wall. 

They went through an increasingly bizarre reversals of gravity, made all the more disorienting by the deeply tinted windows. One minute they were upside down, then upright, then sideways again. More than once Kovacs saw sparks fly from the bulky carapace of the car as they rounded tight corners or barrelled through tunnels not meant for vehicle use. But he could also hear the confusion pick up in the police chatter. When their ride finally slowed to a stop, sliding neatly under the garage canopy, at least one thread of paranoia had unwound from Kovacs’ head. Like most of the pack he tended to attract, Sasha was a pain in the ass, but they knew how to do their job. 

They spun back into the synth sleeve, unbuckling and turning to grin with fake white teeth. “Now, that wasn’t even so bad Kovacs. From all the shit you talked, I thought this job was going to be  _ dangerous _ .”

“There’s always later,” Quell said, while Kovacs rolled his eyes. “Safe house?”

“ _ Mi casa es su casa _ ,” Sasha agreed. “As long as you’ve got the credit, of course.” 

Sasha’s place was a bombed out shell of a building, a halfway house and a chop shop and a hacker’s den all rolled into one. Kovacs had only been there for a day and a night, mostly because he knew better than to sleep in a place full of so many other humans. Someone was bound to get killed that way. 

Carlos, the dipper Kovacs had got ‘on loan’ from the cartel branch in town, was there to greet them. He shook Quell’s hand enthusiastically, smiled nervously at Kovacs, and showed his teeth to Sasha. “You call that lying low? My grandma drives better than that,  _ chico _ .” 

“I wouldn’t have had to do any fancy driving at all if you had kept the fuzz off our trail for more than a minute and a half.” Sasha threw up their hands, walking around the disassembled hunk of a car towards the kitchen. “Hacked the UNB they said, got his mates right out of a bullpen interrogation they said. Pfft. Ask me, Kovacs should send you right back to the cartel with your tail between your legs.”

“Shutting down all the fail-safes on a resleeving fac isn’t exactly cutting daisies.” Carlos snapped back. “Especially when you bring in an unknown stack like that.” He glanced back at Quell, who was standing with her arms crossed and her head tilted to one side. Listening. When she didn’t jump to answer his implied question, Carlos turned to Kovacs...and then kept turning. “I told you you should’ve taken the ride with my shadow program.” 

Sasha waved away the comment, fishing a protein slurry from the fridge. “Listen, mate, I’ve never run that program while I’m spun up, and I’m not about to risk it on a job. A job well done, eh Kovacs?” They toasted him from where he stood in the doorway. 

Kovacs raised an eyebrow, transferred his gaze pointedly to Quell, and said, “I’m going for a walk.” 


	3. Chapter 3

 

She found him in an abandoned playground a block away from the safe house. This world, too close to its sun to be habitable on the surface, had been carved out of the crust like ant tunnels. Artificial lights flickered from miles above, and in this part of town they didn’t bother to pick up two-ton chunks of rock when they fell and crushed a bunch of cheap plastic slides. Kovacs was sitting on a crumbling ledge, head tilted back as if watching for stars. Or maybe more meteor crashes. 

Quell climbed up next to him, perched like a bird on the nearest flat surface. Out of the corner of his eye, Kovacs saw her watching him. And on his other side, her ghost kicked long, dead feet into thin air.  _ Shit _ . 

One Quell sighed and let her head fall back against the stone. “I’ve been under for a long time,” she said, and it was an invitation. 

“You’re going to have to make a decision, Tak,” said the other Quell, and he grimaced. 

“About two hundred and sixty years.” He wished he had a cigarette, one of Ryker’s bad habits he hadn’t yet managed to shake. He wished he had some fucking booze. “Do you want the long story or the short one?”

Neither Quell answered at once. They-- _ she _ \--wasn’t the type to rush in. “Tell me the important one,” she said at last, and her ghost nodded.

Kovacs had to swallow a couple of times to get the words past a lump in his throat. He looked at Quell with all the fear and the helplessness he’d run away from in his eyes. “Reileen betrayed us,” he said hoarsely. “Betrayed you, the Envoys. Even me. She didn’t even bring me.” After Stronghold, he’d been on the run for  _ years _ , had bounced from sleeve to sleeve and world to world thinking everyone he’d ever loved was dead. Then, she could have found him. She was his  _ sister _ . 

She hadn’t, and Jaeger had, and that was that. 

“What else?” Quell asked, and he wasn’t sure which one it was. Maybe it didn’t matter. 

“I went under.” Kovacs could feel the pull of endless sleep on the edges of his words, at the corners of his mind. God, to sleep after so long... “Two hundred and fifty fucking years, they kept my stack. Spun me up for the modern day, so I could see every single thing I--we--didn’t do.” He looked at her out of the corner of one eye--the real her, the one in an old mother’s sleeve. Not the warrior, who’d died on Harlan’s world two hundred and fifty years ago.

“It was just like you said. They called ‘em Meths, on Earth. People so rich they never died, just cloned new sleeves and needle-cast backups to military grade satellites. One got me out so I could solve his murder.” There was more there, Kristin, and Poe, and the Elliots. Earth, used up and rotten. All of it a stage of puppets pulled by Meth strings. The layers of shit he’d dug through, only to find Rei at the center. Just as rotten as the rest. 

“She was one of them,” Quell said, and it wasn’t a question. Kovacs nodded, blew out a long breath. Kicked his feet against the stone and stared up into the LED sky. 

“I killed her. She wanted me to go, and I wouldn’t, so I had to kill her. But it was more than that.” He rolled his head back and forth against the rock, a long, slow refusal of the memories he’d chosen to keep. “I tried...Quell, she wasn’t a  _ person _ any more, none of them were  _ people _ . And I tried to remind her, but she wouldn’t hear it. She didn’t want me, even. She just wanted to own me.” He turned to look at Quell, ready at last to see her reaction. To let her pick up the pieces and turn them into action. Into a  _ plan. _ “She’s the one who backed you up. It was her leverage, if the Protectorate didn’t follow through. Took me a while to find where she’d hidden it. Two hundred and fifty years, and Rei was careful. Plus, I had to lose the Protectorate agents on my tail. Get a new identity or two. Where we are now, no one knows I’m more than a merc. This is a quiet as we’re ever gonna get.”

Quell nodded, and she held his gaze as she thought. Tak found himself leaning in towards her, his back and shoulder cold against the stone. At his back, he felt a hand that wasn’t there settle between his shoulder blades. “Things are different now, Tak,” she whispered in his ear. “You don’t need me to help you anymore.” 

He wanted to protest, to snarl. To see her again. But he knew that if he turned, she wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t ever be there as she had been. That hurt, even if it was a hallucination. She’d been the reason he survived Bay City, sometimes. But she was also here in front of him, a kind of pain so sharp it was joy. So Takeshi sat still as she thought, and felt the ghost of a woman kiss his cheek and fade away.


	4. Chapter 4

They sat together in silence for a while, and all Tak could think about was the last time they’d been alone on a planet at night. He could almost hear the sound of the lake, the insects. Inside his coat, Quell’s notebook lay heavy on his chest. “So what now?” he asked at last, staring up at the cavern lights.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Quell said softly. “What happens next, Tak?” She asked it already knowing the answer, a teacher helping along her stumbling student. Takeshi grimaced and pulled himself to his feet. 

“What’s left to  _ be _ next?” he muttered, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. Failing. “Everyone we ever knew is dead. The Envoys, the rebellion, all that is ancient history to these people. God, for so long now all I wanted was to find you.”

Quell snorted, pulling a leg out of his way as Takeshi made his way back down the broken chimney of rock he’d used to climb up. “Your problem has always been your willingness to follow orders,” she told him. 

Tak had to tilt his head sideways to look at her, a crooked smile on his face. “I hear the opposite, these days.”

Quell only started the climb when Tak was back on solid astroturf, her hands and feet nimble despite the newness of her sleeve. When they were standing face to face again, she took a moment just to look at him. Tak refused to look away: her face was strange, soft and round, but her eyes were the same, angry and loving and piercing all at once. There was an old saying, ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul.’ It was the only window left, when a person changed sleeves. 

 

_ “Do you believe that we can change what we were made for?” Quell had asked them once, all of them, the Envoys. The forest had echoed around them under the shield, and she had paced around them like a lioness. “Do you  _ believe _ that a person can change themselves so completely that they no longer match their job, their world, their family?” Tak and Rei had glanced at each other, and said nothing. Everything had changed, but he’d known her. “This isn’t a rhetorical question,” Quell had snapped, fierce and bright.  _

_ “Well, yeah,” Jimmy had said. He was always the first to break the silence, eager to prove that he knew the answers. “You can just change the sleeve. I came home to my mama cross-sleeved once and almost got shot.” _

_ He got a chuckle out of a couple of other trainees. Quell did not laugh. She didn’t even blink. “Anyone else?” she asked, after her silence had wiped the smile off Jimmy’s face. Always, her eyes caught on Tak’s. She stared at him longer than the others, and he could never tell if it was hatred or judgement or maybe even sympathy in her eyes.  _

_ “No,” he said quietly, and it was an answer to both of her questions. “You can change sleeves, get a new job, kill everyone who’s ever known you. But you can’t change. Not that much.” _

_ Quell continued to look at him. So did everyone else, but she was the only one that mattered. She was the one he was looking back at. “Maybe,” she said at last, and that was all. _

 

“I’m glad you found me, Tak,” Quell said, now, looking up at him. “Because I haven’t given up. The mission changes, just like it did in Stronghold. ‘We are not obligated to finish the work, but neither are we free to abandon it.’” 

Tak leaned back and shook his head. “What work? What mission? They’ve won.”

Quell slapped him. Not hard, but it was the mere fact of physical contact that made him stumble. He had forgotten she was real. “They  _ feel _ they have won,” she corrected him fiercely. “We are Envoys, or did you forget? Let them tighten the noose, let them choke and kill and torture, and then sit on their laurels. We will find the weakness, and exploit it. You think they’ve won, Takeshi, but they have never been more vulnerable. We are free, you and I. Free to strike, to destroy the idols they’ve made on Earth and everywhere else. Never forget that they are  _ always _ the one in the trap.”

Kovacs took in a long, slow breath...and let it out. He could not deny her, not even a millimeter. But that didn’t mean he believed her either. Quell saw it, of course. She turned away from him, back towards the tenements, and started walking. “I suppose it comes down to one question, Takeshi. How much can you change?”


End file.
